Photo by Mirko Fabian on Pexels.com
The Academy Awards have become quite controversial lately. If they aren’t burying animated movies getting a Best Picture nod because of the media pecking order and whiny celebs, they’re nominating a French produced movie about a Mexican drug cartel chief who want to transition to a woman that manages to piss off pretty much everybody they claim they’re trying to champion. Learning the star and director may have a few controversial statements in their past isn’t helping them, either. Then again most of us think the collective Hollywood mindset, even if they aren’t based in Hollywood, is a big joke anyway. It’s a bunch of elitist media snobs ordinarily, but add in modern ideals of “playing to the cool kids” and false inclusion by way of laziness and proving how out of touch they are with the average human being and they’ve become something of a joke to the average human being, who used to watch just to see celebs and get mad that their favorite film didn’t get an award in a particular category.
I’d put it to you that all awards shows are something of a joke. Even awards shows that claim the audience chooses the winner, they didn’t choose the nominees, the industry did. So if your favorite movie wasn’t nominated but a rather boring or garbage movie did, of course you see the awards as something of a failure, the industry finding another way to pat itself on the back whether they actually deserve it or not. I don’t think there can be an actually fair and accurate process for choosing what was the best picture of that year. What they choose may not be what the audience chose, or what failed in the theater (which doesn’t seem to matter anyway) may be more successful on TV, streaming, or home video. Or it might get a cult following years later who got past the bad marketing of the original theatrical release and found a nearly lost gem of a movie.
Since my next intended article needs time to be written properly by post time and there’s nothing current I want to discuss, I’m grabbing a video by YouTube channel All Talking Pictures. In a video titles “What Each Best Picture Winner Tells Us About Hollywood”, the host goes over why the award and the Academy Awards/Oscars exists, and tries to figure out why each choice was made from the start of the Oscars to today. This came out two years ago post time so I don’t expect them to explain why Emilia Perez got nominated when everybody hates it and it became so controversial that they’re trying to figure out how to bury it without annoying the people they actually like (as in not the actual groups the movie is supposed to champion as they all hate it). I do think this will be an interesting look at past winners and what they were thinking, as well as the controversies of some of their choices. See if you can see the host’s own biases in his discussion. Also, he does drop a bit of swearing as he goes on.
BW Media Spotlight 